Planned Colony of Bastos: A Racially Homogenous Colony
Like the other Japanese agricultural colonies in Brazil, Bastos was racially homogenous. Among the initial families, only 20 percent came straight from Japan; the other 80 percent had arrived years earlier to work on coffee plantations and later bought plots of land in Bastos (Mita 1999: 65). However, ethnic homogeneity was not an exclusively Japanese trait. German and Italian immigrants who settled in Brazil in the late 1800s exhibited similar characteristics. As a result of Brazil’s policy not to sell land to former slaves or to poor whites, these three immigrant groups lived in relative isolation in their own rural colonies with little, if any, communication with cities.1 Differences in language, culture, and religion—with the exception of Italians and some Catholic Germans—between Brazilians and these immigrant groups were stark. Japanese immigrants, in particular, were the most isolated because they were racially different from the Brazilian population.
At first, Japanese colonists developed their self-identity in opposition to Italian, German, and Spanish colonists and to African-Brazilian former slaves with whom they worked on São Paulo’s coffee plantations. Japanese also assumed their self-identity in opposition to Brazilians and thus identified themselves as Nipponjin in resistance to all who were non-Japanese (Mitta 1999: 99).
This social and cultural isolation compelled Japanese immigrants to work collectively. By necessity, agricultural colonies cut down forests, built roads, and established schools for their children. Immigrants bought land in conjunction with countrymen with whom they had worked on coffee plantations or with whom they had traveled from Japan. Some bought land with people who had come from the same Japanese province. Unlike other immigrant groups, the Japanese received both financial help and technical and agricultural advice from the Japanese Consulate located in São Paulo. The Japanese government also helped to build and maintain Japanese-language schools for the immigrants’ children (Mita 1999: 58).
Between 1925 and 1941, the Japanese government took two approaches to the expanded migration of Japanese throughout São Paulo State. It both organized planned colonization and provided financial incentives for immigrants. In 1925, the Japanese government began planning colonies on demarcated plots of land. First, Japanese companies purchased large plots of land in western São Paulo, divided them into smaller lots and then sold these lots to Japanese who wished to emigrate. The resulting colonies received resources for public health, education, and cooperatives. Although this kind of colonization involved only 4 percent of Japanese immigrants in Brazil, it’s necessary to consider also those who were attracted by the colonial centers and the production of cotton stimulus given to small land renters (Vieira 1973: 46–47).
The history of the Bastos colony began in 1928, when Yugen Sekinin Brasil Takushoku Kumiai (Bratac), known in Portuguese as the Sociedade Colonizadora do Brasil Ltda. located in São Paulo City, financed the colony with Japanese capital. Bratac intended to establish a colony for immigrants who would come directly from Japan. This proved difficult due to Brazilian immigration policy in the 1930s and the Pacific War in 1941–1945 when Japanese emigration stopped completely. Bratac then decided to sell plots of land to the “earlier immigrants,” those who had arrived previously to work on coffee plantations (Mita 1999: 49).
The colonies founded by Kaigai Kogyo (Colônia de Registro) and those established by Bratac (Três Barras, Bastos, Aliança, Tietê eventually developed into municipalities, Três Barras into Assaí; Aliança into Mirandopólis; Tietê into Pereira Barreto; Bastos kept the same name) (Saito 1961: 213–15). The Japanese government and Japanese colonization enterprises also provided incentives for immigrants to plant cotton in Alta Paulista and Alta Sorocabana. These immigrants also rented small parcels of land (Reichl 1995: 40–41).
Bastos’ colonists were divided into those who had come straight from Japan as landowners and those immigrants and their children who had worked first as coffee plantation laborers before buying land in Bastos. The adjustment of the immigrants depended greatly on whether they were landowners with capital to invest in land, or if they had emigrated as coffee plantation laborers. These laborers arrived in family units or as members of a “composite family.” As immigrants settled in a rural area, their survival relied on their own labor or if they had capital, the possibility of hiring Brazilian workers. Labor and familial relationships were interwoven. All family members, husbands, wives, and children contributed in order to provide food and shelter. Japanese tradition played an important role in maintaining a patriarchal family structure, which empowered husbands and fathers. The immigration experience contributed to the immigrants’ culture, whose system of strong familial relationships helped their adaptation to the Brazilian patriarchal society. The persistence of patriarchal patterns of familial relationships can also be found among other immigrant groups. Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their descendants in São Paulo City (Kosminsky 2004: 291) and Syrian and Lebanese families in São Paulo (Truzzi 1992: 93) followed the same pattern. The noted Brazilian sociologist Antonio Cândido showed that immigrants from areas in southern Italy and Syria adopted semi-patriarchal traits from Brazilian society, because they already possessed similar traits (Cândido 1951: 306–7).
Reformulations of the immigrants’ familial relationships were often linked to the segment of Brazilian society with which they had contact.2 In Bastos, Japanese immigrants and their descendants only met Brazilians who themselves were poor migrants from northeast and southeast Brazil and had been hired by Bratac to clear trees. Contacts with other Japanese Brazilian associations were rare. According to 1937 Bratac data, the colony’s 1425 families included only seventy-six non-Japanese families or five percent of all the colony’s families. Marriage outside the immigrant group was still rare as research in 1953 conducted by ACENBA Nikkei Cultural and Sports Association of Bastos (Associação Cultural e Esportiva Nikkei de Bastos) revealed (Mita 1999: 103).
Until World War II, Japanese agricultural communities of related families gathered to perform religious ceremonies honoring their ancestors. These ceremonies built a strong feeling of belonging to a community. However, in Bastos and other Japanese agricultural colonies in Brazil, families were often not related and frequently had come from different Japanese regions and could not perform religious practices together. Instead, they practiced the cult of the emperor, which was performed in several ceremonies. For immigrants, the cult of the emperor maintained their link with Japan: “they were Japanese living on the other side of the ocean” (Mita 1999: 98). Certainly, this attitude was integral to the Japanese goal of imperialist expansion, which aimed to secure land, raw-material resources, and trustful and respectful citizens. The cult of the emperor was maintained even after World War II into the 1950s. Only then did Japanese immigrants and their descendants realize that they would not be able to return to Japan as they had thought. After the war, Japan was in ruins. The temporary immigration in order to accumulate savings became permanent.
Before World War II, rural communities in Japan were composed of familial groups, whose shared ancestry, religious customs, and mythological beliefs enabled them to maintain strong group allegiance. Families who did not take part in those ceremonies were not considered members of the community. As families in Bastos and in other rural colonies in Brazil were not related and had come from different Japanese regions, they had little in common (Mita 1999: 96). However, their shared traits: physical attributes, language (despite regional differences), customs, values, endogamy, and their self-identity (Weber 1978: 385–98) enabled them to identify as members of the same ethnic group.
The non-related Japanese immigrants’ cohesion could be threatened, especially in regard to their link to